Well, it wouldn't do to let the whole of 2024 pass without a blog post on record, so I'll take this opportunity to look back over this year. It's been a rough one in many ways, but, as always, there are some nice things to note, too.
Loss
The loss of my Mom casts the longest shadow over the year, partly because she was awesome (dedicated her adult life to being a nurse and a respiratory therapist, always pursuing career paths that would let her help the most vulnerable), and partly because she was unhappy in her last years, married to a guy she didn't much like. For related reasons, it was impossible to attend her funeral, and she was, contrary to her wishes, cremated.
So, Sandra did the the most amazing thing for me, and took me back to the Cumberland area so we could recognize her passing in our own way, and reconnect with some happy memories. We sure did. We went to the graveyard where she always wanted to be buried (next to my great-grandparents, who raised her and who helped raise me), and we visited a ton of old spots ... libraries, parks, the old mall, old addresses where we'd lived, things like that. We got burgers at the diner where she'd met my biological father, and played some Ms. Pac Man, which was always Mom's favorite.
That trip made a big difference. It was really good.
Marking Decades
Being an old-timey RPG designer means that most years are some kind of ending-in-zero anniversary for one or more old books of mine, and this year was the 20th for A Kringle in Time, which was already more than a decade old when I published it. While it wasn't their intent, these guys gave Kringle a nice anniversary by doing an "Actual Play" of it. Good fun!
It was also the 20th for Uresia: Caravel. The final All-Systems version remains preserved in amber as a kind of showcase of what I can do. It's still a good one, I daresay.
It's also been (approximately) my 40th anniversary as a roleplayer! The first RPG I ever got was TSR's Marvel Superheroes back in 1984. I blogged here about how bad I was at running it! (I got better!)
"I Hate These Guys"
Of course, it's been a dangerously bad year for democracy and decency. Not just here in the States, but in so many countries around the world. A toxic stew of ignorance, greed, entitlement, cowardice and bigotry (with just a pinch of nihilism for spice) are dragging critical promises into the dirt, carving nations up for sale, and threatening to darken the future beyond our ability to survive it. Even in the best-case scenario, hundreds of thousands of innocent people will die and millions will suffer.
I maintain some hope that the clown-car incompetence and fractious nature of the opposition will doom their efforts to some extent, but enough actually-competent people are helping from the back row that I think the danger might overwhelm the resistance this time.
Meanwhile, the front-row imbeciles are stressful to watch. Even if they weren't dangerous, it's a mind-rending case of "The Stupid, It Burns." But either way, the fight is on.
Work
Work has been going well. It's been a little different because normally I'm not an escapist, which might sound strange for a fantasy-games guy, but it's true. Mostly what I write is satire, and mostly my design intent is a genre-lensed glare at current events, leavened with some jokes and warmth.
This year, Hammondal in particular has been doing double-duty as escape, sometimes. It's still the same-old-me of course, so it's still "sympathetic satire," still fundamentally space opera in half-convincing renfaire cosplay ... but sometimes, I let myself just daydream in "The Light of the Candle Islands," and wish that I could live there. I'm not sure, yet, how this will bend how the city feels to the reader and gamer. Guess we'll find out.
My Trusty GM series of articles is well underway and also engaging me nicely, but in a less-escapey way. Those articles are various forms of GMing advice, design tools, things like that. They'll be released in small sets, like five PDFs simultaneously, a few free and a few for sale.
The back-burner projects, including Fly From Evil and several others, continue at their own pace, and I'm happy with how they're all going. A few are knocked back, a bit, by the election results, since materials held in storage in Colorado will need to stay there longer than we intended. We were finally able to send for our stuff this year, but held off to see how things went. And, well. See above.
Way back early in the year I showed up on a D&D podast thingy, which went really well considering I'm not a D&D gamer! It's a cheerful listen, if you need some happy banter.
Entertainment
It's been a pretty good year for nerd fun! We're digging all the things you might suppose, like Skeleton Crew and What If ...? and the new Wallace & Gromit and all of the Star Trek shows. We enjoyed seeing Wicked in the cinema. We're still being virus-cautious, but we've got a local theater where it's easy to find mostly-empty showtimes. Good for us, probably not great for the theater.
Most of my videogame time has been devoted to replaying older games. I'm doing another run of the excellent and thought-provoking Deathloop right now, and replays of some old GBA and SNES and Infocom titles.
I do still play a bit of Starfield, because I've come to accept that it's never going to get any better, and I've found it's good with the volume turned all the way off, just a mindless loop-shooter to mindlessly loop-shot while I listen to news clips and podcasts and things. I've played a bit of the new Indiana Jones game.
All of my reading is for work, but ... some of it is really good anyway! Some of it, not so much. Lots of historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists. Those aren't lines of work where being an engaging writer is actually required, but now and then, one will surprise me and be amazing.
Bring the 2025 On
Life is a mix of the very-good (home-life with Sandra is wonderful, as always) and stressful (current events and health concerns) but the very-good parts are very, very good. So, overall it's just a matter of figuring out what actions we'll be taking on the stressful parts. TBA.
Hope this finds you well. I'm still around, still doin' the same stuff. I'm still active on Mastodon, and still on Discord as ghalev. Drop me a line sometime if you want to chatter. I'm slow at responding, but I often do eventually!
